text: In virology, the term "sense" has a slightly different meaning. The genome of an RNA virus can be said to be either positive-sense, also known as a "plus-strand", or negative-sense, also known as a "minus-strand". In most cases, the terms "sense" and "strand" are used interchangeably, making terms such as "positive-strand" equivalent to "positive-sense", and "plus-strand" equivalent to "plus-sense". Whether a viral genome is positive-sense or negative-sense can be used as a basis for classifying viruses.